At Lange Straße 134 in Vlotho, there is a house that illustrates the history of the trading town of Vlotho in a special way: the Poelmahn residential and trading house (formerly Brandt).

Around 1818, the merchant Georg Otto Brandt (1785-1832) had the two-storey house built in the traditional half-timbered style, but with a modern room concept. Together with his brother, who lived nearby, he ran one of the largest trading houses in Vlotho on the Weser. At the time, the town was an important trading center in Westphalia, mainly because of its port, which was used not only for regional exports but also for imports via the seaport in Bremen. The company Brandt & Söhne played an important role in this. With the opening of the railroad in 1875, Vlotho's heyday as a trading town came to an end, and Brandt & Söhne also had to file for bankruptcy soon afterwards.

The house went to son-in-law Philipp Heinrich Poelmahn (1809-1871), whose descendants lived there until 1962. First a bailiff in Vlotho and later in Bad Oeynhausen, he moved to Minden in 1851, where he was appointed Lord Mayor. His son Georg Heinrich Poelmahn returned to his ancestral home in 1870 and founded a box factory there for the burgeoning cigar industry in Vlotho.

Today, areas on the first floor are used as apartments. However, the majority of the house will be open to the public in the future as a place of town history furnished in the style of the time it was built, as a museum with an exhibition on 19th century landscape painting and as a place for cultural encounters.

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